


A Road Through the Chasm

by thegildedmagpie



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: (offscreen!), Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Amnesia, Beleg Would Like Turin to Eat His Breakfast, Crass Metaphors, Elf/Human Relationship(s), Families of Choice, Family Feels, Genderfluid Character, Happy Ending, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Implied/Referenced Torture, Miscarriage, Multi, Polyamory, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pregnancy, Sibling Incest, Surgery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-04-25
Packaged: 2018-06-04 12:49:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6658516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegildedmagpie/pseuds/thegildedmagpie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is an agonizingly fluffy, unapologetic fix-it fic in which the children of Hurin get to be happy in their very own elf pile.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Road Through the Chasm

**Author's Note:**

> An extremely belated birthday gift for my Internet sibling.

His eyes are heavy, as though somehow inflated. All his life he's been easy to bring to tears over a fallen sparrow or an injured horse. Yet he could never shed tears enough for what has lately happened; perhaps it's their salty weight that makes his entire head feel so bloated, shifting in silvery-sounding runnels through the pores of his skull. He groans.

“They didn't ask me if I wanted to be saved from you,” says the voice over his noise – a thoughtful, inward voice – a voice that cannot possibly answer to the name that just came to mind. “They didn't give me a choice in what you would be told. I don't think I'll ever know what I would have chosen. I don't think I am who I was then. It brings us very close to death, you know, what happened to me; I got to choose whether I would yield to it, but I didn't have the chance to choose whether I died to you. I am sorry, Túrin. I am.”

He pries his eyes open to see a blur of gold. The syllable he managed to croak was blurred – it might have been _F'uil-_ , or it might have been _Fael-_ , a fricative and a liquid and a damned hope.

“The High King called me Ereinion, when I was fostered with him after I started to grow stubborn about things. I always liked that. There's something else to make a choice about.” She shifts restlessly in her chair – no, upon the floor, she has no chair. Túrin's eyes are starting to focus now. The person beside him looks like Finduilas – but with her golden hair in sleek Doriath-style hunter's braids – but with a slightly bloodstained, sleeved healer's apron pulled over dusty leather garments. She sits on the floor next to the rough, leaf-stuffed pallet where he lies, working beeswax over a bow-string.

“I'm sorry I'm not giving you your choice,” says Finduilas, “but to be fair, Gwindor made that decision, and even I'm afraid to argue with him just now. He's convinced I can save you, whether you want to be saved or not. Whether or not I want to save you. I'm not angry, just … none of this seems _fair_.” She rises with the quick movements of tightly controlled temper and goes to a cupboard. Túrin's eyes focus behind her. There are three bows leaning unstrung against the wall: one tipped in red, one tipped in blue, and a tall, fine black longbow that wakes a tiny screaming voice in his heart.

“We've all taken turns at watching over you, except for … her. She's not ready yet. She can't quite remember you're still alive. But,” Finduilas gentled her tone, “there's no one here you can't trust to watch you sleep. Rest, my love.”

 

\---

 

Everyone had always treated Túrin as older than his years, had expected more of him than he had to give, had treated his boyhood choices as the choices of a man – and the decisions of his manhood as the postmortem struggles of one whose fate was long since concluded. But the first time he'd seen Beleg, the tall and beautiful hunter had picked him up like a child much younger than nine, boosting the boy onto his hip as though it was the most natural thing in the world to carry him home.

When Túrin has staggered through a thatched doorway out of the snug room where he's been recovering, he arrives in the beginnings of a kitchen – half-walled and redolent of pine resin and fires not built quite to the standards of a cook. Beleg sets a plate of seedy cakes and crabapple jelly in front of him. While Túrin stares, trepidatious and astonished, Beleg starts to carefully separate overripe apricots into halves, piling them on his plate.

“Fruit's good,” Beleg tells him. “Trust me. It took me long enough to learn what would make me hurt less, but I know how a belly-wound from that blade smarts. Shut up, Túrin, I'm not blaming you.”

“I didn't choose to kill you, but I did,” says Túrin, his eyes stinging.

“Gwindor's clever with a needle, as it turns out.”

“I chose to kill myself.”

“Good job,” says Beleg. “Eat your breakfast.”

His hands tighten on the table. “You don't understand, Beleg. I can't – I'm not watching this happen to anyone else because of me! I made a choice!”

Beleg leans over the table and looks him in the eye, too close. “You slew a dragon, Turambar. You. Killed. The dragon. Heroes don't belong entirely to themselves anymore, and lovers don't either. Don't you see?”

There are tears on Beleg's face. Even after he was tortured by the outlaws, Túrin's never seen Beleg weep.

“I denied myself,” Beleg says into Túrin's uncomprehending face, “because I remembered you were young – and I was there, Túrin, I was there to see Beren Camlost's face when he told of how Finrod had died for him. I didn't want to know you could suffer that way. But you have, my dear, you have suffered – I don't think I spared you anything. I didn't even spare you mourning me; Gwindor thought I was lost, for all he could do to try to save me, and I couldn't save you from that. But by all we have lost I will make you eat some fruit.”

Túrin ends up licking the juice of the apricots off Beleg's fingers, one by one – suckling his fingers eagerly while he sits on the low bench and Beleg on the rough table. His weakened grasp on Beleg's wrist must hurt, but his friend does not complain. Beleg's hands are salted with both their tears, but the taste is still sweet.

 

\---

 

Gwindor, apparently, has been following him since Nargothrond.

“We'd have waited with Beleg instead of going back to Ivrin, had I trusted my own skill,” is all he will say about any of it, but Túrin can put the rest together. He can see Finduilas and Beleg, both shamelessly bare-chested in the sun as they try to stack undressed stone into a better hearth, comparing the scars of their belly-wounds and laughing at them.

Túrin's own abdomen still bears rough stitches. Gwindor's scarred hands are too clumsy to create neat work anymore. But care and attention and fumbling determination seem to have been enough.

“Gorthaur made a toy of him, I think,” Ereinion confides to Túrin once, while Túrin and Nienor are resting and Gwindor is keeping Beleg company on a hunt. (Finduilas-Ereinion has asked to be Ereinion today, though most days he cheerfully answers to either.) “And under the eye of Glaurung he had to remember it. But he learned enough of resistance in his captivity that he could keep his goals before him; when you went one way, he went the other, and he saved me. Thus I was there to see Nienor fall from the cliff, and fetch him to deliver her of the … of her burden. It seems he'd seen children born among Angband's slaves. She'll be all right, though some of her skin looks as though it ought to be laced; he sewed her up too. We had to use my bow-string for thread by the time she was patched. His fingers must have hurt him terribly, but he never even paused.”

It's almost laughable. Love is what condemned Gwindor to watch his brother suffer, to contribute to his people's most abject defeat. And then despairing love saved them all. Yet Gwindor now does not seem so loving as he once did. There's an anger bubbling through him. As his dedication to closing their wounds broke through the scars that twisted his body, a rage is finally rising through the crust of scars on his soul.

He won't let any of them die. They can pass into legend, but not out of this world. He never says this, but his every step and every hammer-blow upon the lumber and every coarse stitch in the bed-linens declare the message more fiercely than his voice.

It's not that he seems less loving, Túrin decides. If anything, he's more so. But perhaps Ereinion is right; it was dragon-fire that burned the last of his tenderness out.

 

\---

 

Nienor's returned memory is unreliable, for Glaurung wrought great damage upon her with his magic. Sometimes she wakes asking whether the house, which they're building around themselves out of sap-weeping wood and mud and thatch, is big enough to accommodate the baby. Other times she wakes glad of the loss of the child, or weeping for it, or both.

“What became of the babe?” Túrin finally asks Gwindor, low-voiced. The trio of fast-healing elves treat him delicately in his injured state, like he's a bladder full of blood that will ooze and burst if roughly handled. He's allowed to hold armfuls of reeds and hand them nails, but little else. Finduilas is doing all the fine work today, and Gwindor the rough.

Gwindor turns his mutilated face away from Túrin, toward the light for a moment, toward Finduilas. “I buried it,” he says. “I do not know what happens to the children of Men who die before they're born, but it would have been your firstborn. I couldn't just leave it.”

Túrin shifts on his feet, uncomfortable beneath the burden of building materials but stubbornly unwilling to admit it. “Even the child of a brother and sister?”

“Túrin,” Gwindor snaps, that fierceness he's found abruptly coming out, “you and Nienor have each other. If I could see my brother again, do you think I wouldn't fuck him senseless if it meant I get to stay with him?”

He turns his not-quite-straight back on them both. The rhythm of thatching and hammering resumes. Túrin's throat is thick.

“I am sorry for it,” says Finduilas at last, “but I don't know what we would do if she had not lost the child. She should have a woman with her for the birth.”

No one questions that logic, but Túrin can't help but mourn for the son he might have had.

 

\---

 

When the weather gets colder, they wedge Gurthang into that one door that Beleg can't seem to make hang right. It whispers dark and oiled insults to them on occasion, but it keeps the door level.

 

\---

 

Building only one bed is both a matter of convenience – why stuff more mattresses when most of a room can be a mattress? – and a pleasure. Túrin lies awake sometimes when the moon is high enough to see around him, looking into his sister's face as Nienor lies with her head tucked beneath Finduilas' chin, feeling Beleg's arms locked around his waist even in his sleep.

Gwindor tries to sleep apart from them, at first. No one lets him. At first he curls up against Beleg's back, as far from Finduilas and the memories of broken love she carries as possible. But when Ereinion, quietly but in front of everyone, asks if he can try to show Gwindor the pleasure of being taken again, Gwindor hesitates for agonizing moments before he demurs.

Túrin and Nienor exchange a glance. Their easy, wordless understanding of each other has come back faster than their raw desire, though that overpowering, head-swimming feeling is starting to stir again too.

The next night, Túrin and Nienor take Gwindor by the arms and draw him into the middle of the bed. He's shaking with nervousness as they undress him, his eyes squeezed shut, but it does not seem he dares resist them.

Nienor puts her freckled lips to Túrin's ear like a child with a secret to tell. “Can we, if he won't refuse?”

“We'll stop if he doesn't like it,” says Túrin, just loud enough for Gwindor to hear. It startles his friend's pale eyes open when he does – perhaps this concept is still strange to him, or perhaps he can hear the panic clamoring around Túrin's throat, the fear that this act will be another step along a cursed road. But not to act has never done him any good, has it? The despair gives him the power to do as they planned. He kisses the hands that saved him, follows the scars to the shoulders. Nienor, too, explores Gwindor's body with her mouth, and slowly his trembling turns to quivering and then to writhing as long-dulled nerves re-awaken. The children of Hurin kiss every scar made upon the noble body of their protector, and they tell him, first in deed and then in word, that he is still beautiful.

When they wake, all in a sprawled pile, Túrin's mouth tasting of Beleg (for the others in the bed were not unmoved, either), Finduilas asks Gwindor to show Nienor how to comb out her golden hair and braid it, the way he used when they were young and her father sent her for a visit to the house of Guilin.

Nienor's small, nimble fingers are easily guided even by Gwindor's scar-thickened ones, now better suited for coarser work. Between the two of them, they produce an elegant series of plaits, and for once Finduilas seems pleased to look like a princess again for a day.

 

\---

 

It's morning in the little cottage. Beleg has been teaching Nienor to cook again; Ereinion, who has been instructed in the women's baking arts but no longer does it himself, offers them suggestions about the leavening of the bread. Túrin has brought home two winter-lean hares from the hunt – enough for soup – and skinned them out of sight of Gwindor, who finds the process disturbing now.

When he enters, every single one of them smiles.

 

\---

 

Nienor's footfalls are growing heavier again, the spice-sprinkled skin over her cheekbones taut and smooth, and Beleg, Túrin, and Finduilas bring down a stag for her so that its fresh heart and liver can ease the red new cravings. Finduilas still worries that there is no midwife or wise-woman to attend Nienor during the birth. “We'll all attend her ourselves,” Beleg counsels her. “And then we can all pray it's half-elven together. There's a duty for family, if you like.”

Túrin feels a strange sound bubbling up his throat. He opens his mouth and finds it's laughter.

Beleg and Finduilas seem to think for a moment he's crying, for they both turn at once to step toward him and hold him, but once they have him in their arms they catch his mood and in a moment they're all giggling like children.

Finduilas has wrought a spear for hunting to replace the bow, made from sharp, glassy stones found while ascending the hill which is now called Tol Morwen to scan the horizon. Conversation has lately turned to wars still to come, to a kingdom fair and free to be founded. “That's in the future, though,” this talk always closes, with a glance at Nienor's belly.

“I don't want to stop Ereinion doing as he wishes,” Túrin says anxiously to Gwindor one day.

“Nothing can stop Ereinion doing as he wishes,” Gwindor retorts. “The best thing either of us ever did for Finduilas, in Ereinion's estimation, was to place her choice above our happiness – or hers, for that matter. Ereinion wishes to be here, or he would not be. You mortals live short lives; what is it to us but a privilege to make your brief days as beautiful as we can?”

“Beautiful or awful as fate shall dictate,” Túrin rejoins. “I thought you remembered Finrod, my friend.”

Gwindor cuffed him lightly then pulled him in for a kiss – a deliciously confident one, now. Gwindor's kisses were unique for the torture-warped shape of his lips; Túrin loved them. “Ereinion will found a kingdom full of our little half-elven bastard children running about with no account of themselves, with names like _Ambariel_ , doom's daughter, and maybe _Leithambar_ and _Melambar_. Is that awful or beautiful?”

“It sounds horrifying,” Túrin says with feeling.

“Those names?” says Beleg, coming up behind them. “Awful. If I recall correctly, you're the one who told Túrin that Finduilas would shield him from doom if he managed to save her.”

“I'm not going back on my prophecy,” says Gwindor. “I saved her, and now I shall continue supplying Túrin and Nienor with doom.”

“Not if I get to 'supplying' her first,” says Beleg, taking them both in his strong arms for an instant. Túrin yields to the embrace, but aims a kick at him for speaking thus of his sister. “Ouch. Well. Stand by your prophecy all you like, Gwindor; it was you who warded off death, though you were right that we could not have done without her now.”

“Broaden your vision, my friend,” Túrin dares a joke. “Your foresight looked through far too small a window.”

Gwindor shakes his head at them mock-severely, but doesn't pull back from the embrace until the three shoulder their game and start homeward, to a hearth that burns all the brighter for five people so glad to have been wrong.


End file.
